Graham Greene on theology & atheism:

...Now, many years later, as a Catholic in Mexico, I read and listened to stories of corruption which were said to have justified the persecution of the church under Calles and under his successor and rival Cardenas, but I had also observed for myself how courage and the sense of responsibility had revived with persecution-I had seen the devotion of peasants praying in the priestless churches and I had attended Masses in upper rooms where the sanctus bell could not sound for fear of the police...

...when he wrote: "Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God Idea, not God Himself...

...And the reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life...

...Perhaps Unamunohad these in mind author's knowledge, not always easily, not always without fatigue or pain or even fear...

...I asked that the fee they owed me for their extensive quotations, which were mainly from Querry's fable, should be sent to the repair fund of Warsaw Cathedral...

...The critic who saw in it nothing but the old crosses on the Easter eggs (he was referring to Querry's fable) was more at sea than the Marxist critic in Poland who welcomed the novel as a renunciation of the Catholic church, or my dear friend Evelyn Waugh, who realized that Querry was a redraft (perhaps a less satisfactory one) of the old French Cathol itwriter in my short story "A Visit to Morin" and was grieved by the book...

...He repeated the name with a wry smile and added, "Mr...

...I was not a famous Catholic figure as Querry was in the novel [A Burnt-Out Case], nor had I abandoned my church and my old mode of life as Querry had done...

...I wrote to the Communist paper that as a Catholic I considered myself able to treat loss of faith just as freely as discovery of faith, and I trusted that if I were a Communist writer in his country I would be able to take as a character a lapsed Communist...

...Years later, when I met Pope Paul VI, he mentioned that he had read the book...

...I would not look for Querry in that wasteland...

...You end by disbelieving die calculus...

...I told him that it had been condemned by the Holy Office...

...Who condemned it...

...I had not found the idealism or integrity of the Lieutenant of The Power and the Glory among the police and pistoleros I had actually encountered-I had to invent him as a counter to the failed priest: the idealistic police officer who stifled life from the best possible motives...

...I think The Power and the Glory is the only novel I have written to a thesis: in The Heart of the Matter Wilson sat on a balcony in Freetown watching Scobie pass by in the street long before I was aware of Scobie's problem-his corruption by pity...

...chosen by the publishers (selling, I think, two thousand copies...

...After the war was over its success in France, due to Franpois Mauriac's generous introduction, brought danger from two fronts, Hollywood and the Vatican...

...I find nothing unsympathetic in atheism, even in Marxist atheism...

...s idea of God...

...Cardinal Pissardo...

...I would never try to determine some point in differential calculus with a two-times-two table...

...I would seek him among those-Unamuno decribes them-"in whom reason is . stronger than will, they feel themselves caught in the grip of reason and haled along in their own despite, and they fall into despair, and because of their despair they deny, and God reveals Himself in them, affirming Himself by their very denial of Him...

...THE BOOK gave me more satisfaction than any other I had written, but it waited nearly ten years for success...

...But there were new elements in this book, whether it was a failure or a success...

...And again: "the traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to this God Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence they really prove nothing or rather they prove nothing more than the existence of mis idea of God...

...but the attempts to rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology fail to satisfy the reason...

...The price of liberty, even within a church, is eternal vigilance, but I wonder whether any of the totalitarian states, whether of the right or of the left, with which the Church of Rome is often compared, would have treated me as gently when I refused to revise the book on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in the hands of my publishers...

...Querry, like my other character Morin, was a victim of theology...

...I could distinguish even then between the man and his office...

...Greene, some parts of your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that...

...There was no public condemnation, and the affair was allowed to drop into that peaceful oblivion which the church wisely reserves for unimportant issues...

...My wasteland is inhabited by the pious '"suburbans" of whom I had too carelessly written-I had not meant the piety of simple people, who accept God without question, but the piety of the educated, the established, who seem to own their Roman Catholic image of God, who have ceased to look for him because they consider they have found him...

...In England the first edition was one of 3,500 copies-a printing one thousand larger than that of my first novel eleven years before-and it crept out a month or so before Hitler invaded the Low Countries...

...A man can accept the Trinity, but the arguments that follow...

...Morin said to his non-Catholic interviewer, "A man can accept anything to do with God until scholars begin to go into details and the implications...

...in the United States it was published under the difficult and misleading title of The Labyrinthine Ways, Front McConnell reviews Graham Greene's Ways of Escape and Evelyn Waugh's Letters on page 21 of this issue...

...i used to believe in Revelation, but I never believed in the capacity of the human mind*" I had not known Unamuno's A Tragic Sense of Life when I wrote "A Visit to Morin" or later A Burnt-Out Case, but when I came to read his book I found there the same distrust of theology that Morin felt: "The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, die problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life...

...A pious,film called The Fugitive, which I could never bring myself to see, was made by John Ford, who gave all the integrity to the priest and the corruption to the Lieutenant (he was even made the father of the priest's child), while the success of the novel in French Catholic circles caused what we now call a backlash, so that it was twice delated to Rome by French bishops...

...But I had always, even when I was a schoolboy, listened with impatience to the scandalous stories of tourists concerning the priests they had encountered in remote Latin villages (this priest had a mistress, another was constantly drunk), for I had been adequately taught in my Protestant history books what Catholics believed...

...the drunken priest who continued to pass life on...

...Some ten years after publication the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster read me a letter from the Holy Office condemning my novel because it was "paradoxical' and "dealt with extraordinary circumstances...